Decisions are made by those who show up..

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt..

My preference would have been to not go back on the air after 9\11, at all until the time felt right but that wasn't an option..

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder..

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census', and people fall asle….

This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up..

You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back ….

What's interesting, is that I've found that the more accomplished a director is, the more secure they are in giving direction that sounds incredibly ….

As a dramatist, you're looking for points of friction..

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've….

She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news..

I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our ….

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the ….

Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren't that many tour-de-force roles out there for women..

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eigh….

Film doesn't have to worry. Movies are awesome. There's no war going on, theaters aren't going to lose..

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room..

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swal….

Toby Zeigler: There's literally no one in the world I don't hate right now..

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them..

I do enjoy the fact that we don't have a king or queen; we have a person with a very unusual temp job for a few years. My favorite moments on the sho….